Nurture Faith with Dr. Doug Hood

The following meditation was written by Doug Hood’s son, Nathanael Hood, M.Div., Princeton Theological Seminary

Of all the teachers I had while studying for ministry at Princeton Theological Seminary, few left as remarkable an impact on me as C. Clifton Black, the Otto A. Piper Professor of Biblical Theology. As the author of over twenty books and more than two hundred published articles, he was an academic institution unto himself, a one-man library of biblical insight. Lover of jazz, Shakespeare, classic Hollywood movies, and impeccably tailored three piece suits (regardless of the weather), he cut the impression of a man who drank deeply and joyously from the well of life. His immensity of character spilled into the classroom where, frequently overcome by emotion, he would punctuate important points by slamming down an open palm and bellowing like a Baptist preacher. He did just that during my first class with him in a course examining Jesus’ parables. “EVERY WORD,” his hand pounded on the table one early Spring afternoon, “of scripture is PREGNANT with meaning!”

This first lesson has stayed with me over the years since my graduation. When we read scripture too quickly or casually, we risk missing important details that might otherwise transform our understanding of God’s holy word. Consider, for example, the Lord’s Prayer. As presented in the Gospel of Matthew, the Prayer is taught by Jesus as the model for how all Christians should pray. But for many Christians, the prayer is less a matter of devotion than one of muscle memory, a word or phrase repeated over and over again until it loses its meaning. But in his masterful commentary on the Lord’s Prayer, Dr. Black forces readers to slam on the brakes and consider each word with the same care we would use to view a precious jewel. What, Dr. Black asks, is the prayer actually saying to us?

Remarkably, much of the answer can be found in the prayer’s first two words: “Our Father.” Our father. Not my father, not your father, not his or her or their father, but our father. The first word of the first line is an invitation to community. “The Lord’s Prayer is never privatist,” Dr. Black writes, “[the word “our”] pulls the Prayer’s supplicants out of selfish individualism into a relationship of ever-expanding generosity.”¹ Of course, this isn’t to say that we can’t or shouldn’t pray specifically for ourselves and our own needs—Jesus himself prayed for his own deliverance from the cross in Gethsemane. But in this first word of the Lord’s Prayer, Jesus presents us with a model of community.

And what is that model? That can be found in the second word: our Father. Not leader, not lord. Not creator or king, not liege nor ruler. We come to our God as little beloved children, not cowering subjects. Put together, the two little words “Our Father” are not just an address but a command. Remember, they whisper, that even in our solitude each of us are part and parcel of a sacred community held together by a mighty God, a Lord who protects and cherishes each of us as equals. Yes, it is good and proper to pray for our own needs. But here in the Lord’s Prayer we hear Jesus slam his own hand on the classroom table, reminding us that true prayer should be the antidote to selfishness. True prayer should lead to selflessness, instead.

Joy,

1C. Clifton Black, The Lord’s Prayer, of Interpretation – Resources for the Use of Scripture in the Church (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2018), 78.

Dr. Doug Hood’s wife, Grace Cameron Hood, B.C.E., wrote the following meditation.

In my neighborhood, we have a lot of birds. We have a big group of white ibis that spend hours rooting and pecking for worms. The theory is that when there are ibis around, there will be no hurricanes. Do you know what a group of ibis is called? It is a Colony. I found this interesting and funny so I started looking up other names of animal groups. A group of ants is also a Colony. A group of roaches is called an Intrusion. Dolphins are a Pod; fish are a School. Some of my favorites include hippos known as a Thunder, rhinos a Crash. Parrots are a Pandemonium, while eagles are a Convocation. Our friends the owls in their wisdom are a Parliament. Giraffes are a Tower. My absolute favorite is a group of flamingos is called a Flamboyance.

Each name reflects something about the individual participants. Roaches are indeed an Intrusion that everyone in Florida knows and pays to have removed. It doesn’t matter if you call them roaches or palmetto bugs, nobody wants to find them in their house. The wild parrots in South Florida are also aptly called a Pandemonium as they go from branch to branch, screeching wildly. So, what about a group of people who worship God and come together every week? They are called the CHURCH. Just as the name of each group is a descriptor of members, the word CHURCH should also describe us.

The word CHURCH means ‘House of the Lord’. In this space, we come together regularly, worship God intensely, sing, and hear music that soars to the heavens. We are instructed in who God is and what God wants in our lives. We participate in the action of giving, praising, thanking, serving, and hearing. This happens all around the world. I have been in many types of churches. My first memory is of an open-air church where we all sat on logs under palm branches in Congo. I have also attended beautiful churches in Congo decorated with woven clothes, high tin roofs and long hard benches. Gold-plated cathedrals in Brazil contrast to the small woven churches in the Brazilian Indigenous Reservations. A plain building that is a Quaker church in Pennsylvania stands near huge mega-churches that meet in hotels and schools. Stained glass windows are one of my favorite additions which appear in old country churches in muted shades of orange and brown and culminating in the breath-taking windows in the Sainte-Chapelle in Paris.

What ties all these structures together is the word CHURCH, House of God. What characterizes this word around the world is a sense of gratitude. Gratitude for a place to be the people of God. Gratitude for the family of God that comes together in worship and praise. Gratitude for being able to stand up and be counted as part of the group of people that stretches around the world. Gratitude is known and shown as members of the church bend over to help each other, to accept and celebrate our differences, to open wide the doors, and make room for more people who call themselves members of the ‘House of God’ or the CHURCH.

Joy,

Occasionally, many who pray experience an inadequacy—an inadequacy of words, an inadequacy of expression of a deep longing or need. In those moments, this teaching from the Book of Romans offers the assistance of the Spirit. When words fail us, the Spirit is sufficient to overcome our difficulty. John Calvin, a leading church leader in the 1500s, beautifully notes, “we are supplied with heavenly assistance and strength.”[iii]Simply, the promise here is that we are not left alone in our stumbling for adequate words. We are transported to Dostoyevsky’s bridge, where we meet the Spirit who speaks to God on our behalf. We knock on God’s door in prayer and God responds with an impulse of the heart that we are understood even in the absence of words. As the protagonist in Dostoyevsky’s story, we also experience a powerful sense of intimacy—an intimacy with God through the intercession of the Spirit. 

It is the ultimate paradox—where we are the weakest, God’s power is the strongest. Unable to pray, as God would have us pray, the Holy Spirit searches our hearts and crafts prayers on our behalf. It is, finally, an act of grace. Where we are inadequate, God completes the work of prayer. It is work because it results in changes in attitudes and behavior—changes that are the direct outcome of prayer. It is sacred work because it results in a conversion from seeking God’s blessings for our own small projects to becoming captivated by God’s hopes and dreams for us. The Spirit’s prayer on our behalf results in an interruption of our lives. We become attached more firmly to God’s redemptive work in the world. Looking back on the shape and character of our former prayers, we realize how inadequate they really were. They were about us, not God. They were about our individual pursuits, not about a life in a relationship with God.

What remains is a promise. When we don’t know how to pray, when we are at a loss to communicate effectively with our Lord, the Spirit restores communication. From the earliest pages of the Bible, we see that human rebellion and sin broke intimacy with God. That resulted in our hiding from God when God came walking in our garden. With “unexpressed groans,” the Spirit pleads our case before God. We know that God is receptive to the prayers of the Spirit on our behalf because the Spirit “pleads for the saints, consistent with God’s will.” (Romans 8:27) Now we have confidence in our relationship with God—and for our future—because both are now held in God’s grasp, not ours. Without the Spirit interceding on our behalf, it is a certainty that we would continue stumbling in sin and hiding from God. Because God has now taken control of our feeble utterances we can now rest quietly before God, confident that the Spirit will express well our longings.

Joy,

---

  [i]Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Best Short Stories of Fyodor Dostoyevsky. (London: Folio Society, 2021) p. 3-48.

[ii]Dostoyevsky, 11.

[iii]John Calvin, Theological Foundations: John Calvin, Commentary on Romans. (Nashville: B&H Academic, 2022) 198. 

The following meditation was written by Hannah Anglemyer, a youth at First Presbyterian Church of Delray Beach.

My math teacher from my freshman year of high school had a tradition each year right before we took midterms. She went around to each one of her classes with a little black bag containing a bunch of tiny rocks with motivational sayings or phrases etched into the front. Then, without knowing what the rocks say, we all reached inside and grabbed one. According to her, the rock you grabbed is supposed to be something you need or something that can motivate you to get through midterms. The rock I grabbed had the word “gratitude” etched into its front. And so, taking its advice, I thanked my teacher for the gift and tucked it into a tiny pocket of my backpack I almost never touch. See, when I reach into my backpack, I’m usually looking for something—my trigonometry notes, my calculator, my Chinese textbook—or because I have midterms, tests, and then finals to worry about. But now, I’m a sophomore, and that’s all still true! But my homework takes longer, my tests are harder, and for the first time ever, math doesn’t make as much sense anymore. So I forgot about that little rock.

That was until a couple of weeks ago when I happened to reach into that same forgotten pocket and found that little rock right where I had first left it, the word “gratitude” still etched into its front. At first, I smiled at the memory and my teacher’s kind gesture. Then I started to think. In the little over a year since I had first placed the rock in my backpack, I had become incredibly consumed by the homework I still needed to do, the test grades I didn’t yet know, and by my math grade—which is lower than I would like. Finding the rock reminded me that even in the tiny world of high school, I still have so much to be grateful for. Though my math grade may not be what I want, it has improved from where it was! My teacher has gone out of her way to meet with me on several occasions to help me better understand the material, and every academic challenge I’ve faced has helped me to develop better study and time management habits. But it’s easy to forget about gratitude when you’re charging ahead to what comes next. It’s difficult to pause and be grateful for what’s in front of you right now.

I’ve found that applies outside of school, too. When I was younger, my family and I would spend a large portion of the summer with my grandparents in the North Carolina mountains. One of our favorite activities were going on long walks or hikes together. Whenever we set out, I was always very eager for the adventures that lay ahead, oftentimes volunteering to wear a very stylish fanny pack, even when the length of a hike really didn’t necessitate it. But, my attitude usually changed around halfway in. I would start to complain that I was tired of walking and could think of nothing but getting back home to a yummy snack and my favorite kids’ show. My grandfather “Doc-Doc” usually had other ideas, and he always seemed to find ways to add to the length of a hike, never missing a teachable moment. He would often pause to ask what felt like ten million questions: “So Hannah, what type of plant is this,” or “so Hannah, can you name that mountain?” As expected for a kid my age, I almost never answered correctly, which meant an even longer conversation involving a history or science lesson. Despite being moments I now look back on fondly, my eagerness to get back home prevented me from appreciating this time with family and the incredible beauty of God’s creation surrounding me. Looking ahead to what could come next prevented me from being content with the blessings right in front of me.

In his Epistle to the Philippians, Paul writes that he has learned “the secret to being content in any and every circumstance, whether full or hungry or whether having plenty or being poor.” It sounds like an incredible secret; after all, it’s not easy to be content with the present when you don’t know what the future holds. But Paul gives away the secret in the next line. He says he is able to “endure all these things through the power of the one who gives [him] strength.” When we struggle to take moments to show gratitude or find ourselves ignoring what we already have, Paul teaches us to turn to God. Through God, we are able to find peace with what is in front of us now and give proper gratitude for all we have.

Joy,

It is the practice of the Eskimos never to carry the day’s evil experiences, its troubles and its quarrels, over into the next day. Two Eskimo hunters might become engaged in a violent dispute over the division of the game which they had taken, and heated words might even bring them to blows, but once the sun had set and they had retired to sleep, all memory of the quarrel would be erased from their spirits, and the next day they would greet each other as brothers. If you were to exclaim in surprise: “But I thought you were enemies. You were fighting yesterday!” they would answer: “Ah, but that was yesterday and we live only today.”ⁱ That is living in the present tense!

Mark Twain, with his characteristic humor, once commented that he has suffered many things most of which never happened. Doctors tell us that much of our anxiety, which often results in physical, emotional, and spiritual unease, is located in tomorrow, a preoccupation with fears of the future. Consequently, our fears of tomorrow rob us of the opportunity to live fully and abundantly today. Naturally, wise and reasonable decisions and personal behavior must shepherd us in the present day. Careless spending today will result in debt tomorrow. A word carelessly spoken or a relationship betrayed may negatively impact all of our tomorrows. Not all of us have been nurtured in the Eskimo culture!

Jesus’ invitation in this teaching is to locate our hearts in God. Worry and anxiety is all about trying to avoid something, about trying to get away from something. The strain of worry is indicative that we don’t trust the future. Jesus asks that we approach life from another perspective. Rather than fleeing what we fear most, Jesus asks that we run toward God. As Augustine once said, “Our hearts are restless until they rest in Thee.”ⁱ Jesus asks that we live in the present tense, free from the regrets of yesterday and the fears of tomorrow. That is possible after we have accepted God’s forgiveness for the past and trust in God’s care for the future.

Thomas Long writes that there is a kind of worry about the coming day that is normal, even healthy. “Tomorrow’s chemistry test or job interview is bound to provide concern, and this command ‘stop worrying about tomorrow’ is not an invitation to finesse the exam or to waltz into the interview unprepared. Rather, it speaks to the deeper, more basic fear that something is out there in the future that can destroy our basic worth as a human being, something finally stronger than God’s care, some silent killer shark swimming toward us from the future.”ⁱⁱⁱ Jesus asks that we cling to God in such a manner that we can affirm that whatever tomorrow brings, it also brings God.

Joy,

_____________________

ⁱ Clayton E. Williams, “Living Today Forever,” Best Sermons: 1955 Edition, edited by G. Paul Butler (New York, London & Toronto: McGraw-Hill Book Company, Inc., 1955) 106.

ⁱⁱ Thomas G. Long, Matthew (Louisville & London: Westminster John Know Press, 1997) 76.

ⁱⁱⁱ Long, 76.